Warren Buffett’s Fortune Reached About $142 Billion, Making Him the World’s 10th-Richest Person Even After He Has Given Away More Than $72 Billion

Tenth place on the world’s richest list belonged to Warren Buffett again at the start of October. Forbes estimated his fortune at about $142 billion on Oct. 1, 2026, enough to move him past Zara founder Amancio Ortega and back into the top 10, according to a TheStreet report republished by Yahoo Finance.

What makes the number unusual is everything that has already left his hands. Forbes counts more than $72 billion in gifts from Buffett to date, and he has promised that nearly all of what remains will follow.

How the Top 10 Lined Up on Oct. 1

The Forbes real-time ranking put Buffett’s net worth at roughly $142 billion, up nearly $500 million from the previous close. Ortega slipped to $140.1 billion after shares of Inditex, the company behind Zara, fell 1.6%. Former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer sat one spot above Buffett with close to $160 billion.

The ranking moves daily with stock prices. Buffett’s return to 10th place came as Berkshire Hathaway, valued at more than $1 trillion, traded slightly lower for the year but up more than 80% over five years, according to the same report.

Almost all of Buffett’s fortune sits in Berkshire stock. That means the size of his wealth, and the size of his eventual gifts, rise and fall with one company’s share price.

The Gifts Already Made

The single biggest share of Buffett’s giving went to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over nearly two decades, beginning with a 2006 pledge. That stream has ended. In a Berkshire Hathaway news release dated July 14, 2026, Buffett said he had converted 8,000 Class A shares into 12 million Class B shares and given all of them to four family foundations:

• 9 million shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation
• 1 million shares to the Sherwood Foundation
• 1 million shares to the Howard G. Buffett Foundation
• 1 million shares to the Novo Foundation

The math behind the conversion is simple: each Class A share converts into 1,500 Class B shares, so 8,000 Class A shares became exactly 12 million Class B shares. The conversion did not change the value of the stock; it simply turned a small number of very high-priced shares into a much larger number of lower-priced ones that the foundations can hold or sell.

The Gates Foundation received nothing in the 2026 round. InvestmentNews valued the July gift at close to $6 billion, more than four times the roughly $1.4 billion the four family foundations received the year before. The trade publication also reported that the Gates Foundation’s own statement puts Buffett’s lifetime gifts to it at more than $47 billion.

After the July donation, Buffett still held 188,290 Class A shares and 1,162 Class B shares, according to the Berkshire release.

A Deadline for Giving Away the Rest

Buffett has put a date on the remainder. In the July release, he said he aims to dispose of all his Berkshire shares “within about eight years” and that his remaining shares will be donated to the four foundations “one way or the other” by Dec. 31, 2034. He added that he plans for annual grants to grow for each of the three foundations run by his children, with the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation’s grant growing somewhat faster.

The plan follows a promise he made publicly 16 years ago. His Giving Pledge letter, signed in 2010, commits more than 99% of his wealth to philanthropy, either during his lifetime or at death. In the same letter, Buffett wrote that spending more than 1% of his wealth on his own family would add nothing to its happiness or well-being.

InvestmentNews put the value of the shares Buffett still held after the July gift at more than $140 billion. Under his own timeline, nearly all of that is set to move into the four family foundations by the end of 2034, on top of the more than $72 billion Forbes says he has already given.

Buffett’s Role at Berkshire Now

The ranking comes as Buffett’s formal role at the company he built keeps shrinking. He handed the chief executive job to Greg Abel at the end of 2025. Then, on Sept. 18, 2026, Berkshire announced that its board had elected his son Howard G. Buffett, a director since 1993, as chairman under the company’s long-standing succession plan. Warren Buffett became chairman emeritus and remains on the board.

“Warren’s impact on Berkshire and its owners is without parallel in the history of American business,” Abel said on behalf of the board in that announcement.

Why the Figure Matters Beyond Omaha

Buffett’s wealth has long been part of a wider debate over how the richest Americans are taxed. He has argued that ordinary workers would owe far less if more large companies paid the way Berkshire does, a claim covered in Buffett’s argument about 800 companies. Federal data on how effective tax rates compare at the very top is laid out in the IRS figures on billionaire tax rates.

For now, the $142 billion estimate is a snapshot of a fortune that its owner has committed to giving away. Each future gift will be valued at whatever Berkshire stock is worth on the day it moves, so the dollar total that eventually reaches charity will depend on the share price between now and the end of 2034.

Get stories like this by email. Sign up for The Parent Diaries Letter.

This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: USA International Trade Administration – Public domain/Wikimedia Commons